We fight. We write. A blog to help authors continue on their journey.

Empty space on a shelf, update on my first novel ‘Current’

Getting the Examiner job has created a big time consumption on my writing. I have been trying for several weeks to get in with several other journalists for press passes to advanced screenings and such. Another massive chunk of time that has been consumed has come from writing the novel.

For the uninformed or those who haven’t been here for a while, I have been attempting to complete my first novel entitled ‘Current.’ The book is a suspense thriller that focuses on a crew of nine working on underwater current turbines to provide renewable energy to the west coast of the country. Their personalities clash and tensions rise as it becomes apparent someone is out to sabotage their every move.

The novel is coming along very well. The novel is currently at a word count of 13,472 as of this morning. According to publishing standards, that puts the book with 53.88 completed pages. As time has progressed, my chapters are longer than they should be after calculating what they should be to fit everything into the book. This is proving interesting because I do not want to fight the process or the characters. In the third chapter I had a revelation about the character and what was most important to her. As a result, the chapter spent nearly five pages on a piece I hadn’t initially planned for.

I also did something recently that was something a woman at a bookstore did that I will never forget. I played the ignorance card initially and did what all nerds/aspiring writers do. I went to a Barnes and Noble and asked a sales associate what are the best books about novel writing that I should buy. This nice woman, who I regret not getting her name now, spent several minutes discussing my book concept, what my eventual goals were, at lot more than she ever had to as a sales associate at a Barnes and Noble. Anyway, she took me over the general fiction area, since the book lies more with generalized fiction than science fiction. She took me to the ‘F’ section and cleared out a few books. It was then I realized what she was doing. She looked up and said, “Take a look. This is where your book will be. When I put it on the shelves, this is where it belongs.”

It was a moment of absurd clarity for me. It gave me a visualization of what could be in a very tangible form. So, a few months later I went to a Borders and did the same thing with a camera in my hand. It was extremely gratifying afterward, although a bit awkward at the bookstore. I tried to keep it covert as explaining my reasoning for taking a picture of a bookshelf would be odd.

I will try to keep updates coming a bit more frequently. If you haven’t seen it yet, check out my Examiner page to see where my time and effort has been going. The empty space on the shelf my book will fill.